Free

By Todd Komarnicki

Jefferson Alexander "Free" Freeman, a confused homeless man, investigates a series of brutal murders, journeying from the back alleys of New Orleans to Hong Kong and facing a confrontation with the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385468490
• ISBN13: 9780385468497
• Release Date: June 1993
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Length: 273 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Now we see through a glass darkly

The Roman Catholic convert John Henry Newman concluded sadly that the literature of England since the Reformation had been essentially Protestant. In America today even that much earlier cultural uniy is gone. There abound Jewish novels, agnostic hymns and wiccan manifestos. On that spectrum Todd Komarnicki's FREE is a Catholic novel with evocations of Newman, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and others. Consider a few of the pervasively Catholic elements of FREE. (1) The pathetic but striving anti-hero Free (christened Jefferson Alexander Freeman) had been raised Catholic in a dark past preceding his arrival in New Orleans at age 17. He is now as old as Jesus was when he began his public ministry, also after a mysterious childhood. Like Jesus, Free has no place to call his own. But Free is a shattered, pathetic, despairing failing Christian. (2) Free is rebuked by a sympathetic black priest friend for wolfing down communion wafers to still his hunger. (3) The priest and his sister deal with Free from within a Christian world view conditioned to care without questions for a pathetic brother who cannot lose residual dignity. (4) The street-smart, homeless Free embeds glass shards in his head by falling through a church's high stained glass window to the street below. (5) At novel's end Free's wounds are miraculously cleared up in the church of his black priest friend during a sermon on angels and after Free's vision of angels flying about below the ceiling. Graham Greene would have marked this novel for a second reading.From fantasy to realism: Komanarcki's treatment of Hong Kong in the years before the 1997 turnover from Britain to Red China. The reader sees Hong Kong through the terrified eyes of local Chinese reacting to the recent violent put down of democracy in Peking. Thousands decide to flee at all costs, to escape to America, to New Orleans. Their legitimate passion for a better life plays into the hands of heroin smugglers who provide the refugees with passports and a network of bribed officials who feed them into the USA and to many cities besides New Orleans. In that city a tattoo found on the murdered corpse of one of the Hong Kong Chinese, a red fleur des lis, leads Free and his newly found Chinese American detective girl friend back to the British Crown Colony in a search for the source of an unholy grail. For the fleur de lis is presented as a religious symbol, with both Marian and diabolical overtones. Again, the Catholic perspective resonates with Chesterton and Greene: in which good and evil are sometimes so close as to seem identical.A good read as puzzle, as symbolism, as theology and as a confused soul's notably blind groping for God.

Todd Komarnicki: Why isn't this man famous?

Every so often a new author comes along and shares a vision with his readers that had yet been unseen. Komarnicki is such a man. He has the courage and non-myopic reason that is truly refreshing. In Free, Mr. Komarnicki takes on a subject that is hoplessly difficult to draw attention to: homelessness. The books primary character, "Free", is not a pathetic, grubby character. Instead, Komarnicki carefully creates a sincere, intelligent man who is radically loyal to the end. Very intersting and very enticing. I would love to meet this fascinating author.